Kamping in Kalbarri, WA

8122009

We’ve been gone for a month now and still no signs of wanting to come home. We took off to Kalbarri, WA (About 750 Kms from Perth to the north) for a couple days of camping. We left the morning of Dec 1st, crammed all of our gear and the 4 of us into Aaron’s Falcon, with a bag of junk food and 4 fully charged Ipods and hit the road. We arrived Murchison River Caravan Park with just enough sunlight to set up our tents, BBQ some dinner and head to the beach with a couple of drinks to watch the sunset. We found this old decrepid boat on the shore and set up shop, the sunset turned every color under the rainbow..it was incredible and then we packed it in early. Had a terrible sleep since it was SOOO windy and very hot.

The next morning , after breakfast, we loaded on the sunscreen and went down the “Coastal Drive” to check out the cliffs along the coastline. With each stop the cliffs got higher, the wind got stronger and the sun got hotter. Along the way we kept seeing these signs that told us to look out for dolphins in the water, so we did. We were starting to get sceptical. The second last stop was this place called Natural Bridge, it was a wonderful view and everyone agreed that it was the best stop so far..but still no dolphins. We were joking about how they put up those signs to make tourists disappointed. On the last stop called “Island Rock” Julia spotted them first…a pack (or heard) of dolphins, 8 big ones and 2 babies leisurely swimming by the rocks all the way down below. It made the all-morning coastal drive well worth the visit.

We headed back to our campsite for a hamburger lunch, packed up the Esky (cooler for those of you in Canada) and rented a power boat for 2 hours to go upriver and do some swimming/tanning. The boat was rickety and had a 5 HP outboard, so it took us almost an hour to do 8 kms including about 15 minutes of pulling the boat through shallow water since we went the wrong way. We stopped on a beach to swim and had to go back right away. The ride back was rough, the current and waves had started because the wind had picked up and all 4 of us got absolutely drenched. once we dried off we made our way to the Jetty for some fishing with our nifty new rods. We caught about 20 fish between the 4 of us but they were all very small and not enough for a hearty dinner. We had a bit of a fiasco when our bucket full of bait and fishing gear fell in the ocean, Jeff had to dive in with only his skivvys and rescue our gear. As the night ended we were disappointed with our fishing skills and this really foul-mouthed New Zealand guy came to fish and he was terribly drunk, but he told us to try bigger bait and bigger hooks, Aaron agreed and decided we will try that tomorrow. We took note of his advice, grabbed some Fish and Chips from the shop on the way back to our site and feasted on yummy seafood.

The next morning we had this brilliant plan to drive over to Kalbarri National Park to check out some rock called “Nature’s Window” which is supposedly like a hug hole in the gorge through which you can see the river quite nicely. Well we go there and found our it was 11$ to enter and then you had to drive 30 kms on a dirt road to get there….so we turned around and found something better to do, we did see a Kangaroo on the way so it wasn’t a total loss. Back in Kalbarri the Murchison River meets the ocean and there is a really interesting sort of peninsula which you can only get to by…you guessed it….swimming across. it wasn’t a bad swim on the way there only about 10 or fifteen minutes. We were exploring the area across the river and Jeff and Aaron were crab hunting in the rocks as Julia and I sun bathed in the shallow water…we noticed that the tide was coming in and the wind was picking up and figured we should probably head back before the swim is too difficult (especially since Aaron has a broken collarbone). When we made it back to land we hung out at our campsite with a couple of our Canadian neighbours from the Carvan park and waited until it was time to go fishing again, this time with bigger bait and somewhat bigger hooks. Aaron is hooked on fishing at this point and that’s all he wants to do. The time arrives and we head to the Jetty for round 2.

Round 2: Nothing great but the highlights were:
Eva: Caught her biggest fish to date, a 25cm black bream
Jeff: Caught his biggest, the all time biggest to date and also the only different type of fish we caught all week, a 30cm baby Malloway
Aaron: Was addicted to the point that he wouldn’t let Julia try at all
Julia: The pelicans got alot of food as we kept throwing back our small fish to them

The next morning was time to go home but we decided to stop at 2 sightseeing spots on our way home. The first was the Pink Lake which is actually pink and very very salty, everything is covered in a thick and slightly pink crust of salt which is pretty damn cool. What can I say, most lakes are blue, give the women a lake too and make it pink.
The second stop was the “Pinnacles” which are in this dessert full of yellow sand and then all of these limestone type things sticking out of the ground like as if they were growing. The drive through the Pinnacle Dessert was interesting as the photos looked really cool with the clear blue sky, and the winding path was pretty fun to weave through, but they were not the most interesting part of our trip to Kalbarri. After that Jeff and I slept the whole way back to Perth. Upon return we plan to find a car and hit the road before Christmas crept up on us.